


Forgiveness (i)

by passeridae



Series: Variations on a Theme [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Cheating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 09:18:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15838314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/passeridae/pseuds/passeridae
Summary: Taking out one’s heart is easier than it seems, you just have to know the trick. It takes a sort of twisting motion, a partial inversion of the self, and then it’s in your mouth. From there, you can spit it out. She spits it onto her plate; this is not the first time she’s had to observe her heart in this way.





	Forgiveness (i)

The call comes in the evening. Absently, she picks up her phone but it is not her mother. It is him. He croons down the line, voice like molasses, telling her how she is missed, how he sees now that he has wronged her, how he wants her forgiveness. Despite all he has done, she says she will consider it.

When he hangs up she stares blankly at the flowers on the windowsill. Daffodils, withering with cold only to once again unfurl from the dirt like veins under skin; pulsing with fragile life. She stares until the yellow sears into her brain and makes her head pound.

On the other side of the kitchen, a beeping starts. Jolted from stillness, she rises to turn off the oven but doesn’t eat. Leaving the food to cool, she takes a clean plate from the cupboard and places it on the table in front of her. It is on this plate that she places her heart.

Taking out one’s heart is easier than it seems, you just have to know the trick. It takes a sort of twisting motion, a partial inversion of the self, and then it’s in your mouth. From there, you can spit it out. She spits it onto her plate; this is not the first time she’s had to observe her heart in this way.

The first time, she had been twelve and newly in love. Not knowing quite what she was doing, she had spilled blood all over the kitchen. Most was easily cleaned away, but there was a splash that stained one of the jonquils on the counter. She had planned on taking it and pressing it as a memory, but her mother gave the bunch to the neighbour as a gift, never noticing the blood on the bone white petals.

Dispassionately, she stares at the clot of her still-alive past sitting in front of her. Across its ropey surface, there are impressions of bitemarks, silvery and scarred. One for every person she’s ever loved. The largest of these bisects her heart, as if a mouth had closed around her and gnawed. This is the one that he has left. Unlike the others, it is raised and red, painful to the touch. Fresh despite its age. She looks at her heart, and sees that it is too small, too scarred to hold forgiveness.

The oven beeps again and she remembers her food. Taking a second plate, she moves the asparagus, the carrot, the fish. She places them on the china and is repulsed by the smell. But she knows that tomorrow morning she will be hungry, so rather than throwing it away she puts it out of sight. Into the fridge it goes. Opening the door, she sees it; a chance.

There, nestled next to a dozen eggs, is a cow’s heart. It takes up an entire shelf, almost the size of her head. She had planned to eat it later in the week, but now it has another purpose. Using both hands, she takes it from its place and cradles it to her chest. As she walks back to the table, old blood, brown and tacky, seeps into her shirt. The heart falls to the table with a wet thunk. With a small knife, she cuts into both her heart and that of the cow, carefully separating ventricles from atria.Then, with great care, she plucks several hairs from her head and braids them into thread. Delicately, she sews her new heart together with her hair, tiny stitches almost invisible against the heart’s texture.

Her new heart is far less scarred, and she can almost feel the weight of her past lifting from her. This new heart, she thinks, has space for forgiveness. But even though the space is there, she cannot yet forgive him. After introspection, she realises that her heart is too closed, too cloistered, an unknown land where emotions enter but only love leaves. She knows nothing of this place, nothing of how to turn love into anything else. She cannot forgive. She does not know how.

So she opens her heart. She takes tupperware from the cupboard and cuts out neat little squares of clear plastic with the same bloody knife. She holds them up to the lamp, watching the light stream through. Transparency, that’s what she needs. These squares are harder to graft on than the cow’s ventricles; too rigid, too pointed. It hurts, in a way that expanding her heart did not. The edges stab into the holes she’s made, a constellation of tiny pains with each breath. But now she can see into this unknown place, and map a path. Finally she can see, and there is room. Now, she can forgive.

She places her heart back in her mouth; it is much larger now and swallowing it hurts. Sharp corners cut into her gums and her jaw aches from the stretch. Once it is in her chest, the pain stays. With every beat of her heart, she feels a reverberation around her ribs and across her spine. A deep ache, damp and heavy, overlapping with scattered pinpricks of agony. Is this the price of forgiveness, she wonders, all this hurt? It must be. It must be the good kind of pain.

Overjoyed, she calls him back. His voice is rough from sleep, cracked around the edges. There is a moment of perfect silence from both of them before a soft voice asks “Darling, why are you on the phone in the middle of the night?”

She hears the rustling of cotton and his voice pitched away from the phone, “Work call, go back to sleep, Cariad”. Not directed at her, but at whoever is that now warms his bed. Memories crawl out from the back of her mind, calls in the middle of the night and half-absent hands carding through her hair while his thoughts wandered elsewhere, abruptly turning harsh and focused when something didn't go his way.

It is at this moment, with his low voice on the phone, and a deep pain in her chest, that the tupperware squares in her heart crack and she can truly see, without a plastic filter, into her heart. “Oh,” she says into the phone, and again, “oh”. It hurts, how it hurts. She can see inside the landscape of her heart, see the path she has taken, and now she knows without a doubt. None of this has been for her.

Her heart throbs in her chest, a beat of pain and sharp, sharp, pricks. It thunders through her chest and her ears, blocking out his annoyed hiss at her continued silence. All of this pain, all the work she has done, all the alterations to her heart; they have all been for him. The plastic cracks and cracks and the pain is unbearable. Her heart beats and beats and each beat is agony. If this is forgiveness, she doesn’t want it.

“I don’t forgive you,” she says down the phone to his responding growl, “don’t call me again.” Without pausing to let him speak, she hangs up the phone and throws it in the sink. Her breath hitches on a sob as she stares at the daffodils on her windowsill, glowing gold in the morning light, as her heart continues to break.


End file.
